- Benevolence. Technological progress is human progress; it is positive and benign in and of itself. Some formulations go so far as suggesting that only technology can promise human and social transcendence; progress is technological advancement, hence the longstanding strand of technological utopianism in the most technologically advanced societies (Segal 1985). This makes critical views of technology especially difficult to voice, since they are automatically framed as conservative, romantic, and reactionary, or—the designated derogatory—Luddite (Robins and Webster 1999, 39–41; Postman 1993, 43).
This chapter presents the digital discourse on network cosmology along three narratives. These narratives both echo the tenets of technologism in general and update them to the specificities of network technology. The digital discourse, the chapter shows, naturalizes, theologizes, and teleologizes network technology. It argues that network technology is more akin to nature than any previous technological paradigms. With the added premise that technology largely determines society (so that technological characteristics are inscribed in society), it creates a trinity whereby society itself is presumed to take on a more natural form with network technology being the medium between the natural and the social.
Related to the rhetoric of naturalization is the idea that technology offers a form of transcendence almost spiritual and religious in nature. According to this theological narrative, the increased digitalization and networking of social life (i.e., its rationalization) does not entail a process of disenchantment (the hallmark of rationalization during industrial technology) but rather offers a road to transcendence. As Weber’s “iron cage” (Weber 1958) becomes digitized and networked, it also wins back the soul it had lost with the emergence of industrialism. Lastly, the digital discourse constructs a cosmology in which humans recede to the background and occupy a supporting role in a new history, where technology is the protagonist. In such a history, network technology is seen as the teleological climax not simply of the history of technology but of the history of the universe. It is in this sense that technology is teleologized, that is, becomes the subject of its own history, and is dissociated from the social context within which it is developed and deployed.
Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Criti<sub>q</sub>ue
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